Category: user experience design and research

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Guest post 'Tips for digital participation, engagement and crowdsourcing in museums' for London Museums Group

I was asked to share some of the lessons I've learnt from building digital participation projects in museums and from my research on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage for the London Museums Group blog following my talk at their “Museums and Social Media” event on 24 May at Tate Britain.

They were published at 'Tips for digital participation, engagement and crowdsourcing in museums by Mia Ridge', but as the site doesn't seem to be loading I've re-posted it below. I think most of what I wrote then holds up, but today I'd add a third bonus tip – plan to ingest the results of your crowdsourcing tasks into whatever internal systems are necessary to appropriately integrate and re-share the enhanced or new data.

To pinch from my headings, I discuss the advantages of digital engagement; challenges for museums – new relationships, new authorities, dissolving boundaries; 6 tips for designing digital participation experiences in museums; 2 bonus tips for designing crowdsourcing projects in museums.

There are other event reports at A round up of the LMG Museums and Social Media Event.

If you found this post useful, you might be interested in my book, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage.

Continue reading "Guest post 'Tips for digital participation, engagement and crowdsourcing in museums' for London Museums Group"

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Card-sorting activity at the Commodity Histories workshop

The AHRC-funded Commodity Histories project aims to produce a 'website that will function as a collaborative space for scholars engaged in commodities-related research'.  The project organised a workshop, 'Designing a collaborative research web space: aims, plans and challenges of the Commodity Histories project' in London on 6-7 September 2012.

As part of opening session on the 'aims, plans and challenges of the Commodity Histories project and website' I led a card-sorting exercise aimed at finding out how potential scholars in the community of commodity historians would expect to find and interact with content and other scholars in the network.  We prepared print-outs of sample content in advance and asked participants to sort them into groups and then label them.  At the end of the workshop I presented the different headings the groups had come up with and discussed the different ways they'd organised the material.

While some work had been done on the site structure previously, the process was useful for understanding some of the expectations people had about the functionality and sociability of the site as well as checking how they'd expect the site to be organised.  Various other presentations and discussion during the workshop reinforced the idea that the key task of the site is to enable contributors to add content easily and often, and tempered our expectations about how much scholarly networking would be visible as conversations on the site.

has written up some of the workshop at The Boundaries of Commodities.

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Residency: a week of rapid prototyping at the Powerhouse Museum

I spent a week as 'geek-in-residence' with the Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies team at the Powerhouse Museum.  I've written up some of it at Geek for a week: residency at the Powerhouse Museum (though there's a lot more to say about the testing and the idea itself).

Two PDF versions of clickable prototypes tested in the museum:

ConversationsAboutCollections_v1Download
ConversationsAboutCollections_v2Download
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Workshop: 'Lightweight usability testing' workshop at dev8D

I ran a 45 minute workshop on 'lightweight usability testing' at dev8D, an event for (IT) developers in the UK's higher education sector.  From the abstract:

"Usability doesn't have to be a drag, and user testing doesn't have to take months and a cast of thousands. Following the principle that 'any user testing is better than no user testing', lightweight usability is based on the idea that all you need to produce useful test results to improve your software is a bit of planning and a couple of hours.

In this session you will learn to plan and run a lightweight usability test based on a project you've worked on. At the end of the workshop we'll run a live usability test based on participant's examples from the workshop."